Path: utzoo!attcan!uunet!mcvax!enea!sommar
From: sommar@enea.se (Erland Sommarskog)
Newsgroups: comp.lang.misc
Subject: Re: Bondage and Discipline Languages
Message-ID: <4246@enea.se>
Date: 16 Jan 89 21:18:49 GMT
Organization: ENEA DATA AB, Sweden
Lines: 23

Eric S. Raymond (eric@snark.uu.net) writes:
>> Speaking of *obvious* examples, what isn't a B&D language?
>
>C. C++. Lisp. Basic. Fortran. Any assembler. These languages escape the
>category by including enough low-level primitives to support just about any
>programming style that's even vaguely procedural; of course, you may have to
>give up a lot of the language's expressive power to do so.

I must admit that I have found this discussion somewhat phoney. What is
B&D must be totally subjective. To me C seems like a typical example.
The programmer gets stuck in a bondage of discipline and has to think 
of irrelevant that a language like Ada saves him from. (Which Eric's  
last line also says in a way.)

But to throw some new wood on the fire, consider the following: Assume
you have routine you want to call but whose name you don't know until
run-time, thus you have the name in a string. Now in which langauges
can you easily do this? Interpreting langauges like Lisp and Basic,
support this I guess. But compiled langauges?
-- 
Erland Sommarskog
ENEA Data, Stockholm              This signature is not to be quoted.
sommar@enea.se